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A Mixed Bag

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Now it is time for me to finally sit down and write the post I have largely been avoiding writing since Thursday.  For those that have been living under a rock this week, or otherwise disconnected from the internet…  Thursday was the time at which Blizzard broke with tradition and announced a new World of Warcraft expansion at a convention other than Blizzcon.  For awhile now I had made the comment that if they had a shot in hell at keeping players interested… they could not afford to wait until November to announce what was coming down the pipe.  Looking at the convention calendar the only slot that really made sense was either GamesCom or Pax Prime…  and since they were planning a significant presence at GamesCom that was my theoretical choice.  The truth is while I said this… I never actually expected it to happy until last week when they actually verified that was the case by posting the moment the announcement would happen.  Thankfully for me it happened over my lunch hour and I freely admit I went into this announcement with a bunch of emotional hype.  Deep down inside of me there is still a player that hopes someday for World of Warcraft to turn into the game I really want to play.  You can’t be engaged in a decade long relationship with a game without having some glimmer of hope.

A few days ahead of the announcement I posted my list of “serious” predictions… that in truth only had one valid prediction.  After watching the final cinematic for Warlords of Draenor, there was literally only one place this expansion could go.  We were going to be taking on the Burning Legion in a new invasion of Azeroth, and sure enough as the teaser rolled and showed our old buddy Gul’dan pulling another of our old friend Illidan out of some kind of green crystal prison… it pretty much set the tone of the show for me.  At face value the idea of a Burning Legion expansion is pretty cool, but it also has a very “repeating history” feel to it.  In truth this entire expansion is a tapestry of cobbled together ideas left on the cutting room floor from previous games that lore fanatics have been begging for.  We are going to get to see the remainder of the Broken Isles and the Tomb of Sageras as well as finally finding out what is going on in the Emerald Dream.  These are all awesome components on their own…  but just because I love Peanut Butter and I also love Alfredo Sauce…  doesn’t necessarily mean that putting the two together is going to be even more awesome.  I am in this strange place because as much as I did not want to play a “Dances with Orcs” expansion… the Warlords reveal gave me all manner of warm fuzzies up and down my spine in spite of not really wanting them.  This reveal on the other hand, had all of these elements that I should love… but left me not really feeling anything but skepticism.

Demon Hunters

A Mixed Bag

The biggest feature of the expansion is that we are adding another Hero Class to the game, meaning that they will start somewhere between 95 and 100 according to further elaboration in a similar manner to how Deathknights did in Wrath of the Lich King.  This is a class that I have wanted so badly since I first knew there was going to be a World of Warcraft.  Illidan Stormrage is quite literally the only Elf in the Warcraft universe that I like, in part because he looks badass and runs around with the Twinblades of Azzinoth.  It seems that there is going to be a tank option as well for the class… which should make me even more excited to play them.  I admit the whole angry half demonic tattoo’d elf thing largely works for me, and I’ve always thought the blind fold thing looked badass.  I just feel like I should be more excited than I am about it.

Melee Hunters

I have images of me that I have posted her tanking Scarlet Monastery on my Hunter back in Vanilla.  For better or worse I spent a significant amount of my time meleeing as Hunter, in part because I was frankly too cheap to restock bullets constantly.  When I ground out the faction with the Firbolgs… I did pretty much all of it with a two-handed weapon and my pet.  Is it wrong that the announcement that Hunters are actually getting a melee spec was the point at which I have gotten the most excited for this expansion?  It seems that Beastmastery is going to work pretty much how it works today, and that Marksmanship is going to be losing the pet but essentially getting Lone Wolf like buffs.  The problem has always been that survival did not feel sufficiently different from the other trees other than the reliance on traps.  Now apparently Survival will be up close and personal in melee range while still keeping the pet, which makes it sound a lot like the Beastmaster soul in Rift.  For a long while that was my dps soul of choice, because it let me run around beating on things… while having a really cool cat pet at my side.  This might seriously be the best news for me personally in the expansion, because I love the idea of a hunter…  I just never really enjoyed being ranged dps.

Class Order Halls

A Mixed Bag

 

This is another really cool idea, but one that I am deeply skeptical.  Essentially the plan is to create special areas that only members of a specific class can go to.  Inside of it will be the givers of specific class based quests, and a whole new follower system that allows you to go out on adventures with fledgeling members of your class order.  All of this sounds pretty kick ass because I loved Archerus as a Deathknight, and having a specific area I could go to just for my class.  The problem there is that it never really became a “hub” for players, and as Blizzard has moved on past Wrath it progressively became a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to have to keep going back there to Runeforge new weapons.  My biggest fear however is that in WoW 8.0 this will become yet another awesome idea that has been relegated to the dustbin just like the Halfhill Farm, and soon to be Garrison and Shipyard.  The WoW team is exceptionally bad at creating constructs that will leave on with the game past a single expansion.  One of my key frustrations with the game is that it is a series of loosely connected disposable content packs rather than one seamless living and breathing world.  While Class Order Halls might be fun for an expansion, I full expect they are already planning on the next new thing to replace them.

Artifact Weapons

A Mixed Bag

Apparently the Relic Weapon quest from Final Fantasy XIV is coming to World of Warcraft, but they are taking it further.  If I am reading an interview correctly it sounds like there simply won’t be weapon drops in the Legion expansion at all.  This is honestly not a horrible idea at least from a game design perspective because it means that content becomes so much easier to balance.  Upgrading your weapon in any game tends to be the single biggest power boost a player can get, since it has a function…  increasing your damage/healing/survival rather than simply being a random collection of stat boosts.  By assuring that players evolve this power over time through the completion of content, this gives you a measured gauge to scale against rather than somehow trying to make things doable with crappy white quality weapons… but at the same time not an absolute train wreck when done by anyone with epic quality anything.  Again they are making a stab straight at our nostalgia by having us reforge classic weapons from lore.  The example they give is that we will be quite literally collecting the fragments of Frostmourne and reforging them into a new weapon.  I have to admit this sounds badass…  but the problem once again is… this sounds like a system that they will be all too happy to abandon come 8.0.  If they promised that from this point out, we will be able to keep upgrading our weapons with ever more intricate designs and quests backing them up… then I would probably be extremely amped.  I just lack the faith that this is going to be something that will be around for awhile.

It Could be Awesome

A Mixed Bag

I freely admit that the raw material of this expansion that was announced on Thursday could end up making an extremely awesome expansion.  The problem being that I just do not have faith any longer that Blizzard will create a game that I want to play for the long term.  I absolutely enjoy playing each expansion and leveling through the content.  I fully expect that I will purchase Legion when it launches and enjoy myself while leveling a few characters.  The problem is that the game doesn’t have enough that I want to do once I have gotten three characters to the new level cap.  Three seems to always be the number, it was the case in all of the recent WoW expansions, and was the case in Rift and SWTOR.  Once I have seen the content that third time… I am just done with it for the time being and ready to move on and do something else.  The systems that are there just are not sticky enough to keep me logging in on a daily basis, and the majority of my time in Warlords was spent logging in for ten minutes to fiddle with my Garrison and then logging right back out.  Now they hinted that they are trying to come up with reasons for us to run dungeons even after we have hit the level cap… and I look forward to seeing more detail on this one.  That was ultimately the thing that kept me going in Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and the thing that ultimately felt pointless in most of the expansions since.  It honestly feels like they are trying to borrow some ideas from Final Fantasy XIV… which is absolutely a good thing… pending they actually took the time to understand why those ideas work in that game.  Right now I have zero faith…  but there is a tiny fire in side of me that wants to be in love with Azeroth again.  So here is hoping as we move closer to the likely Q2 2016 launch window that something will rekindle that fire.

Breaking the Format

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A Time for A Change

A few days ago I made the above statement on twitter, because I had reached a point where I was finally frustrated with my original blog theme.  For the last several years I have structured my posts in a way as such to hide the faults of my theme.  For example the whole “heading” construct that I use is largely to keep any images I post from overflowing and acting wonky.  I’ve used the same theme since 2008 and over those years I grafted new appendages onto it like an undead juggernaut until it reached the point where it was simply having trouble staying upright.  My theme believe it or not was originally a super limited World of Warcraft theme, that I have revitalized time and time again trying to keep it current.  When I first started my blog for example, there was no menu editor in WordPress, and the theme was originally designed to have someone actually go into the php pages and edit navigation items.  I hacked in basic nav support, but I have finally decided to get off my ass and apply some structure to the way things are laid out.  After spending an hour and a half the other night reclassifying posts… I came to the sad realization that my theme didn’t actually have suckerfish style menu support and every bit of effort I had just done was essentially in vain.

So quite literally I did nuke my old theme from orbit and replaced it with a brand new one.  For awhile I had considered building my own and I have downloaded Underscores more than a few times to get started on that.  However the end product never really makes me happy, and it always ends up feeling extremely spartan.  So while I COULD build my own theme… I decided not to.  Instead I decided to go with the extremely flexible GeneratePress.  The freebie version has a lot of features, but I ultimately wanted some of the things that their paid addon gives you, and after doing some of this myself for years… that $30 seems like a steal.  Ultimately to have a theme that I can simply patch each time a new version of WordPress comes out and adds more toys to my disposal is worth twice that amount of money to me personally.  Last night I rebuilt the logo from scratch and pestered the hell out of one or two friends as I tweaked this font size or that amount of spacing.  I think I am mostly done for the time being, but I am sure I will be tweaking things over the coming weeks.  I am curious to know what people think, so drop me a line and let me know.

Breaking the Format

Another thing about my blog that frustrates me, is that I have a clearly defined format that I always seem to follow.  In large part every post has three headings, three images, and six paragraphs.  In that format I usually introduce three completely different subjects as I hop around through what I have been doing.  For awhile I have referred to this at least privately as my “swiss army post”, that is everything to everyone and reliable.  I absolutely do not mind reliable, because in truth every single day I have a conversation with my readers… albeit a generally one sided one.  I share lots of details of my life, and my gaming… and that part is awesome.  The problem is that every single day feels formulaic, and I am hoping to begin to change that a bit.  As I was sorting my posts I noticed that I have this way of starting down a path only to quit after a few weeks.  There were so many “series” that I started down and never got very far…  remember Easing Into Eorzea? or Forum Fodder Friday? or even the more recent Storytime Saturday?  All of these are prime examples of why the daily posting routine has become so important to me.  I know that once I get disconnected from my routine… I never really return to it.

Ultimately what I want to do is allow myself to post more spontaneously.  When I make more than one post in a day… it feels like I am stealing material from what could be the next mornings post.  So I hold off on doing it… and then a backlog of ideas happens… and I feel are no longer relevant because I did not post them “in the moment”.  While I started Blaugust as this festival of routine and regularity… I think personally I am going to use it to mix things up a bit.  I already nuked my theme from orbit… maybe it is time for me to nuke my format as well.  Once again I would love to hear some feedback from my readers since I am basically going to be doing some renovations to what you have come to know about this blog.  I am sure I will still create swiss army posts in the future, because at this point I can knock them out while I am sleeping…  literally most mornings I don’t remember writing a post.  However I also want to play with the format a bit and try and find room for smaller and more focused posts.  One of my key problems with advertising my posts on Anook for example, has been that rarely are they actually devoted to a single game.  This also was a huge problem when it came to trying to categorize my posts.. because you might click through to my World of Warcraft posts to find half of them only mention the game in passing.  Essentially I want my Tales of the Aggronaut to be better than it actually is, and I am hoping you are all willing to struggle with me on this new journey.

 

Fridays Are For… Yelp?

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Friday has become a weird blogging day for me lately. My habit is generally to write out a post the night before, as the last thing I do before going to bed. Having tried writing posts at different times of day, however, I’ve noticed that the thoughts I have and the kinds of things I write about are very different depending on when I write the post.

As part of this, I started working on trying to seed in posts at different times, so that I’m putting a post up every day, but not always at the exact same time every day (and, more importantly, not writing them at the same time every day). Given that I’ve missed a few Fridays because Friday apparently is a busy-ish day for me most weeks, this hasn’t worked out so well.

On the other hand, writing at 2:30pm rather than 1am means that my mind is on different things. Right now I’m thinking about how difficult it is to find trustworthy reviews of places. I need to get my oil changed, and according to yelp there are about 40 places within a reasonable distance I could go to do this. Yelp reviews have fallen into the problem of public reviews in general– pretty much no one ever gives something an accurate number of stars– it either gets 5 stars (if it was a good experience) or 0/1 (if it wasn’t), and figuring out what kind of place I’m going to based on a bunch of random people’s one-sided reports isn’t terribly useful now that everyone uses Yelp.

Fridays Are For… Yelp?

The same is true of apartment hunting, restaurants, glassdoor company reviews… everything. Everything is three to three-and-a-half stars, and often reading into a particularly bad review suggests that the fault miiiiiight not lie with the company in question, although sometimes it does.

What I’ve been mulling over is the idea of a yelp-style concept that plugs into existing social media (yelp may already do this, but it’s poorly advertised), so that what you get is your friends’ and acquaintances’ reviews of things. I feel like, properly done, it would drive more casual and more helpful reviews while also encouraging people to both review more often and at a higher quality. Instead of a star system, it could just say “friends have posted from this location X times in the last Y days” and show you what they’ve had to say over time (and you’re more likely to actually care, because it’s your friends).

Food for thought. Time to make some key lime pie.

The Role of Randomness

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I really hate random results. It’s one of the reasons why Magic: the Gathering gets under my skin– even a perfectly constructed deck has a significant chance of losing you the game because you get a series of bad draws.

In most games with random elements, the goal of skilled play is to reduce the effects of the random element as much as possible. The more you can do this, the better. It’s what makes Infinity a tactically compelling game and other minis wargames starkly less so. Skilled play involves maneuvering and planning (two things that don’t involve a random element) in order to maximize your odds of success when you do inevitably have to turn to the RNG to determine your fate. Skilled play revolves around reducing this value as much as possible, and in Infinity you can reduce it quite a bit, through good planning and proper application of tools. In MMOs, you reduce randomness by planning strategies around random occurrences– if the boss has a nasty attack that randomly targets two people, part of your strategy involves everyone knowing what to do if it’s them that gets targeted.

Some element of randomness is important in games, however. A lot of games require that you do the same thing over and over again, and some unpredictability in results keeps things interesting. It’s often a relatively narrow band, but it’s what makes critical hits so fun (and critical failures so interesting). As a DM and game designer, I keep this very much in mind, because it affects enjoyment a lot.

The Role of Randomness

Consider the following: The critical item you need to succeed drops slightly less than one percent of the time. Success is doing that thing over and over again and fishing for that less-than-one-percent chance. That is miserable. Comparatively: If you score a critical hit, you get to perform a cool, class-defining attack. You have a critical hit rate of about 50%. This is a lot more fun, because it’s not predictable, but your odds of endless repetition for the slim hope of success is really unlikely.

Here’s the thing. As soon as something is possible in a game, it gets fed into a risk/reward analysis. People like to dismiss this as “theorycraft” or “mathhammer” or “crunch”, but the reality is that it’s true for every player. If you get a new ability, you’re going to experiment with it to see what it’s good for, or how cool it looks, or what-have-you. Alternately, you’re going to go to someone else who’s already done that experiment. Even if you’re just using said ability “because I like it”, you’ve still made a risk/reward analysis. Something with a random chance of occurring (say, a weapon proc or drop) is either not good enough to be worth pursuing or good enough that you absolutely must pursue it at any cost. This is why people spent months trying to get Thunderfury in Vanilla WoW, despite the pathetically low drop rate.

The Role of Randomness

For an extreme example, think of an ability that, one percent of the time (or less!) allowed you to use a cool class ability. Let’s say that, one percent of the time you cast a fireball, that fireball would be an AoE for full damage on all targets. You’d never use it, and you’d probably hate the ability. You’d barely notice when it triggered, you’d be mildly happy when it triggered when you wanted it to, and you’d remember every single time it triggered when you were trying to be really precise about your targeting and it screwed something up. It would be frustrating and maddening to use.

The key is that, in order to be fun, random effects need to be a few things:

  1. Not punitive.
  2. Frequent enough to be noticeable.
  3. Controllable to some extent.
  4. Not crucially tied to basic, moment-to-moment functionality.

This is why the Machinist in FFXIV is so frustrating for many people to play. Your basic attack combo has an element of randomness to it. It’s worth noting that the class gives you a method with which to control that randomness to some extent, which is kind of a big deal. It’s what makes the Astrologian fun– you get a random card draw, but you have options with what to do with that card. Infinity’s range bands and shooting odds are controllable. Well designed raid bosses don’t kill you randomly with mechanics (and the ones that do are viciously disliked).

The Role of Randomness

Like many things, it’s a matter of moderation. Randomness is important or you can decide games before they’re played– it’s a very easy way to avoid your game being reliably “solved”. Tic-tac-toe is a solved game, but if the game randomly selected a square that you COULDN’T play in every turn, it would quickly not be solved (though it probably wouldn’t be much more fun).

There’s an elegance to games that are not at all random but are still not necessarily predictable or easy to win. Go is a good example, as is pretty much every bullet hell shooter. Similarly, some wildly random games are still fun– while I personally dislike Magic, a very large number of people play it and its randomness is a very good way to muddle minor skill disparities (which is what it was designed for to begin with) while still allowing large skill disparities to stay noticeable.

The Role of Randomness

It’s probably apparent by now that I don’t gamble. C’est la vie.